Software I use
This page lists software that I currently use.
- tmux
- Google Chrome and Firefox for web browsing. These days I try to do most of my browsing in Firefox, because it does a better job of remembering pages I have visited in the past, which is important for me. (Chrome seems to have a short memory, and many things don’t show up when I type it in the address bar). But Chrome is faster (especially on JavaScript-heavy sites), so I use it for sites like Gmail and Facebook, and then I’m often lazy so end up following links from within Chrome instead of copying the URL and visiting in Firefox. (For most JavaScript-heavy web apps, often the easiest way to use them is to run them under an incognito Chrome window, rather than manually enabling a bunch of domains on NoScript or uMatrix.) (Update: Since April 2021 when I bought a new computer, I’ve just been using Firefox since Firefox is now fast enough even for the JavaScript-heavy web apps, at least for now…)
- Vim (mostly Neovim since about July or August 2020) with various plugins for most text editing.
- Git
- Anki for spaced repetition
- Remnote – I am trying this out as a way to combine note-taking and flashcards. Before I used it I thought it was crappy software, but this podcast episode convinced me to give it a try, and I’m glad I did!
- ELinks, Links, or Lynx for
lightweight browsing depending on what I want. ELinks has tabbed
browsing which I find easy to use, but Links can show images with the
-gflag. Lynx seems to do correct checking for SSL certificates and additionally has-localhost -dumpthat is suitable for producing plain text dumps of webpages. - Exuberant Ctags
- Music On Console (MOC) for music
- Newsbeuter (actually called Newsboat now)
- Ubuntu on laptop, and Ubuntu and Debian on server
- KeePassXC
- Bash for my shell (I’ve tried both zsh and fish but found them more annoying than useful. I think bash+fzf is sufficient to make the command line really pleasant to use)
- Pandoc
- I use a modified version of Solarized Light as a colorscheme in my terminal. By default, Solarized has various shades of gray in its 16-color palette, which makes some console programs difficult to use; I therefore replace those colors with the equivalents from Tango. You can see the resulting values.
- PDF.js or Atril or the Chrome PDF viewer for most PDF files. For short PDFs, PDF.js suffices, but for longer PDFs I usually download a copy and read them on Atril.
- yt-dlp
- GNU userland, mainly because that’s what comes with Debian and Ubuntu and is what I’m most used to.
- rsync
- I often use
less(e.g. instead oftail -fI useless +F) - fzf, mostly for recalling commands in bash with CTRL-R.
- Emacs org mode, and Emacs in general for prose (Emacs handles long lines better than Vim, and when text isn’t line-based like in code I find navigation more intuitive in Emacs). On the other hand, I find Emacs to be quite terrible for code editing because it doesn’t operate on “logical lines” the way Vim does, and code editing on Emacs also causes wrist pain for me.
- Zim Wiki for a local private wiki
- Python/GHCi as a desktop calculator
- Telegram desktop app – I tried signing up via the web app but it didn’t work so I installed the desktop app. Now that I have an account though, I could probably get away with using the web app.
- f.lux
- Tux Paint to make drawings for my Tao Analysis Solutions blog
- Emacs+mozc for Japanese and Russian input (I should use something like ibus but they require restarting the computer and they also stop working after upgrades and such. Since I don’t use Japanese/Russian input much, doing everything via Emacs has been acceptable to me so far.)
- spaced inbox (written myself)
- urlwatch
- Sumatra PDF – seems like a pretty great PDF/DJVU/ebook reader. I really like that it provides tabs, which most PDF readers don’t. It also displays epubs just like a PDF whereas most epub readers try to do weird pagination stuff that just makes it harder to read the book.
- Obsidian – for editing this website. I use this filter that I wrote which makes the same Markdown files that work on Obsidian also be compilable using Pandoc. Actually it looks like at some point (probably after I wrote my own filter) Pandoc implemented alternative wikilink syntaxes so I should probably just use that instead.
- SuperMemo
- ripgrep – replaces grep/ag. I still do use grep on places where I can’t get ripgrep. But ripgrep has saner defaults so I don’t even need to bother to look up which flags to use.
- WSL 2 – development on Windows is very annoying but at least WSL gives me a sane Linux environment
Web apps (I’m ignoring social media, passive content consumption services like YouTube, and video conferencing apps):
- Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Forms
- Roam
- Duolingo
- WordPress
Programs in trial mode:
- broot
- fdfind
No longer in use:
- Steven Black’s hosts file – I got annoyed that whenever I tried doing tab-completion for e.g. ssh hosts in the terminal, the tab completer would start trying to match against the spam sites I’m trying to block! Plus, uBlock Origin seems like maybe good enough on its own.
youtube-dl– replaced by yt-dlp, which I gather is a better-maintained version of the same tool (but I haven’t done much research here; just I’ve heard people recommending to switch)- Redshift – I hardly use the old Android tablet I have, and my new Redmi phone came with its own night mode thing
- arbtt – was too annoying to do cleaning/data analysis on so I gave up.
- ag
- Flameshot – was useful on Linux, but now I’ve switched to Windows which has a pretty okay built-in screenshot software.
- IPython (now called Jupyter Qt console) – idk, I haven’t really been doing any data analysis lately
- kitty (terminal emulator) – Was using it on Linux, but now I’m on Windows. Old note: the only annoying things so far are that when I resize the window, some gaps appear, and when I try to attach to a tmux session via ssh it fails (there’s some way to fix it by copying terminfo files, but it seemed complicated so I haven’t tried it yet).
- Foliate as ebook reader. I used to use FBReader/Calibre but both of them broke after an Ubuntu upgrade. – replaced by SumatraPDF on Windows.
- KDE Plasma as a desktop environment (I used to use MATE but tried KDE on a whim and found that it has fewer annoying bugs) – switched to Windows
- Xournal, for signing some contracts (Xournal allows one to draw over the PDF and then export the result as PDF) – I mostly just use the free version of Adobe Acrobat or some in-browser PDF reader for editing
- I also install moreutils for
sponge. – I got lazy about installing it and don’t do this anymore.
See also
- Colophon
- Account names, for SaaS
- Firefox for my Firefox plugins
External links
- “Choosing Software” by gwern